A three-wire electric fence stretched over the train tracks that had led us to the mine. They encircled the rocky bluff in both directions. I saw a dirt road and a metal gate in the distance.
“It’s a safe bet they’re watching the gate,” I said, sliding down a short ravine.
We had parked the truck a mile back and hiked our way along a dry gully.
“We’ll have to find another way in.”
“Milan.” The doctor’s voice was grave.
I saw why as soon as I turned. Something was wrong with Cerise. She was frozen.
“What is it?” I looked to her bandaged wound, but it seemed secure.
She stared at the bluff behind us. She was transfixed.
“It’s here,” she said.
“What do you see?” I asked.
“It’s . . .” She squinted but didn’t take her eyes from the scene.
Kai touched her arm after a moment as if to wake her, but she didn’t appear to be in a trance, just mesmerized by the vision.
“It’s like a dark sun. It’s . . .” She struggled for the words. “Glowing darkness. It’s black. But it’s bright. It’s bright black.”
The doctor pointed with his staff to a sign in front of the electric fence, which was posted by the U.S. Department of Energy. Bold print over small white test in a red box which explained in detail all of the Federal statutes we were about to violate.
I stood before the wires. I could hear the hum. “Any ideas?”
Doctor Alexander drove the tip of his staff into the ground under the wires, then pushed it forward so it would rest against them, bridging the circuit. There was a slight crack and a burst of sparks and the staff fell forward to the dry dirt, landing with a thud.
He picked it up, smiling.
“Show off,” I accused.
Kai bent one of the posts with his boot, and each of us stepped over. We snuck slowly up the rise to get a view of the mine. Cerise reached the ridge first and peered over. Then she stood.
“Get down!” I called in a stout whisper.
She pointed, and the others joined her.
It was destroyed. And very recently by the look of it. A semi lay on its side after breaking through the gate and striking an empty water tower, which had fallen over a small office, like a mobile home, and ripped part of the wall away. The rear of it was still smoldering. A line of black smoke rose as if from a chimney. A much older building, sided in wood slats, was at the back, near the steep gravel rise that led to the cave opening at the top, which was caged shut. The door to the building had been ripped free and lay in the dirt. We listened, but other than the occasional breeze, there was nothing. We shuffled carefully down the dusty slope. It wasn’t until we made it around the cliff that we saw the full extent of the damage. Cerise whistled without thinking.
“Sorry,” she whispered, covering her mouth.
Three SUVs were parked in the lee of the bluff, presumably to take advantage of the shade it offered. One of them had exploded. All of them were riddled in automatic gunfire. We had come expecting a fight. Just then it seemed like we had missed it. We walked one by one through the door of the wood-sided structure and into a long, open work area that had been cleared except for two desks, some chairs, and a sideways filing cabinet. There was a glass-lined manager’s office at the back, although most of the glass had been broken. There were nine men in the room, presumably the owners of the vehicles outside. Several had soiled themselves. All but two were conscious. But they were in a state that even now I struggle to describe. They were pale and listless and very far away. Not deranged. More like detached, as if they were no longer in our world, as if someone or some thing had drained their vitality, as if a sharp straw had been rammed into their bodies and used to suck out their essence.
A pale man sat cross-legged on the floor playing cards with himself. He had a deck in his hand and drew the cards one at a time. But they weren’t playing cards. They were tarot cards. Each one he drew was from a different deck. But every card was the same. Every card was Death. He played one on a descending line, stopped, and turned to me. For a moment, it seemed like he would say something. Like he wanted my help. Like he was trapped playing the strange game over and over and he needed my help to finish it. But the moment passed and he resumed his play.
“Any ideas, Doc?” Kai asked. He stood before a prone man whose eyes were wide open. He was still breathing.
The doctor shook his head. “I’m not a physician.”
With his foot, Kai nudged the prone man’s leg. There was no response. “Yeah, well, I don’t think they have a medical problem.”
Cerise glanced at me, expressionless, before beginning a reconnoiter of the room. The ceiling had collapsed to one side, apparently on top of something. Doctor Alexander walked to the manager’s office and knelt in front of a heavy-set Latin man with a bushy mustache who was heaving swiftly but silently, as if preparing for birth. The pair met eyes for a moment. But there was no recognition. The doctor waved his hand in front of the man’s eyes. Nothing.
“I have no idea,” he said softly.
“It’s like they’re . . . living mannequins,” Cerise breathed. She bent to one and started going through his pockets.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Maybe they have something we can use.”
“Ah,” I said. “You’re our thief.”
The others paused, as if just considering the idea. Then they bent to do the same.
The fallen paneling moved suddenly and a gun opened fire directly at Doctor Alexander. Three bullets cracked before the gun clicked impotently. Two struck the wall behind the doctor. One was true—but deflected off his staff, which he held before him making the sign of a ward with his free hand. The force from the bullet, which ricocheted past Cerise’s head and hit the paneling, spun the heavy staff, pulling it from the doctor’s hands, and it fell to the carpet with the shooter, who had never got her balance. She hit a sideways desk and then the floor. There were three indentations in her bulletproof vest. A fourth projectile had clipped her left side, and she was bleeding and in obvious pain. As she pulled herself up, panting, to lean against the desk, my lips pursed in shock. She was tall, gaunt, and had her hair buzzed to the nub. There was a tattoo of a simple sideways eye at the crown of her temple.
“Detective Chase . . .”
The others had ducked for cover, and they watched as I strode slowly to stand before the woman on the ground.
Her head fell when she saw me. She put a hand to her side, which was wet with congealed blood.
“Friend of yours?” Kai asked, standing.
“I wouldn’t say that, no. But we have the same enemy.”
“There’s a medic kit in my pack,” Harriet said with short breath. She nodded to the long, bent ceiling panel that had previously fallen over her.
Kai slid it away and brought her the camouflaged military backpack underneath. She tried to open it but her hands were shaking.
“Here.” Kai slapped his hands together hard and rubbed. Like he was starting a fire. He pressed two fingers of his right hand to her neck. The fingers of his left hand played her wrist and forearm like a flute. When he stopped, Harriet’s breath slowed. She was visibly calmer.
“What did you do?”
“It’s kinda like acupuncture,” he said. “It won’t last forever.” He took the medic kit from the bag and looked up at me. “We need to get her stitched.”
He and I carefully worked her vest over her head. She lifted her shirt with a grimace and Kai cleaned the wound with alcohol swabs and dribbles from a water bottle, which Harriet also used to take pain medication and antibiotics. After the doctor confirmed nothing major had been hit, as best as he could tell, I started stitching the slit in her side, which narrowly missed a rib.
“You sure you know what you’re doing?” she asked.
“I have been in more wars than you ever will,” I responded softly.
Kai called his wife and took the opportunity to rebandage her wound as well.
“What happened here?” I asked.
“Something hit us.” Harriet shook her head. “I couldn’t see it. It was like . . . I dunno. Like a burning building collapsed on my mind.”
“How did you even find this place?” Doctor Alexander asked incredulously.
“A little birdy told me.”
“Who is she?” he asked me insistently.
“This is Detective Harriet Chase, formerly of the New York City Police Department.” I paused. “She’s the one who broke the seal on the sanctum.”
“WHAT?” Cerise and the doctor went ballistic at the same time. She practically pushed her husband off her.
“What the hell were you thinking?” they said, and “Are you stupid?” and “Why would you do that?” and on and on.
“I know,” Harriet said, and “It was my fault,” and “I’m sorry.” Finally she yelled it. “I’m sorry! Alright?”
“Stay still,” I chided. “I haven’t closed this yet.”
“I fucked up. Why do you think I’m here?”
“Why are you here?” I asked.
“Why do you think? I’m looking for the chef.”
“Etude?” Cerise perked. “Where is he?”
“He showed up at the warlock’s place. Downtown. Right out of the blue. I had the place staked out. He had a kid with him.”
“A kid?” I shouted. “What kid?”
“I dunno. A little boy. I don’t know what happened to the chef. He never came out. But they took the kid here.”
“Why would Etude have a child?” Cerise asked me. I could tell she was skeptical—not because it wasn’t something Etude would do but because she was afraid it was.
“You expect me to believe you followed them all the way here?” I asked Harriet. “How did you really find this place?”
“I snatched one of those bastards off the street. Creepy motherfucker. He had pictures on his phone.” She took hers out of a cargo pocket. She unlocked it and showed me.
I paused when I saw the image. Then I took the device and cradled it.
“There’s more,” she said.
I swiped. She was right. There were numerous pictures of the most darling little boy. I almost couldn’t stomach it. They weren’t hurting him—I didn’t know why—but they were doing everything they could to scare him, including killing a dog, an adorable little puppy, right in front of him.
“Scroll to the one with his hands,” Harriet said. She finished the water bottle and tossed it.
I swiped quickly, accidentally passed the image with a clear shot of the boy’s hands, and went back.
“What is it?” Cerise walked forward. I’m sure she could see the shock on my face. I turned the screen to show her.
Etude’s marks were on the boy’s palms.
“How is that possible?” she asked.
That was why they weren’t hurting him. They couldn’t.
“It’s possible,” I said. “He gave them to me once.”
“And what happens to him?” she asked.
“He’s vulnerable,” I explained.
Cerise turned to Harriet. “You said you were following him. Where did he go?”
“I don’t know.”
“WHERE?” Cerise demanded.
Kai put a hand on his wife’s shoulder. A square of cotton fluff clung to her gash with specks of red. There was a roll of gauze in his hand.
“I don’t know,” Harriet repeated. “I was trying to tell you. The asshole who took the pictures didn’t wipe the EXIF data. There was a GPS coordinate in the metadata that led me here.”
“Clever,” the doctor said.
“Standard forensic procedure. Look, you all can hate me all you want. I deserve it, okay? But I’m here and I can help. We’re on the same damn team.”
“No.” Cerise raised a finger to her.
“I don’t think that’s your decision.” Harriet looked to me.
I took a long breath and sighed. They all looked to me expectantly. “We vote,” I said, and Cerise groaned. “Those in favor of Detective Chase joining our little expedition, say aye.”
“Aye,” the doctor said.
Cerise spun. “Seriously?”
“We have no idea what’s down there,” he said calmly. “We need all the help we can get.”
She pointed to Harriet. “She’s half the reason we’re in this mess.”
“Cerise—” I started.
“She killed Mr. Dench!” she yelled. “Or may as well have. She’s the reason it happened.”
“I understand why you’re upset,” I said. “I have more reason to be angry than you. But people make mistakes, Cerise. Sometimes very serious ones.”
“Fine!” Cerise yelled. “You made your stupid point.” She swiped the gauze from her husband and walked out the door.
“There’s a condition,” the doctor said to Harriet.
“Name it.”
“You’re in front.”
She snorted.
“Kai?” I asked.
He looked out the door. Cerise was gone. “I’m just here for her,” he said.
“No. You’re risking as much as any of us.”
“More,” the doctor said, and I shot him a glance.
Kai didn’t catch it. “What do you think?” he asked me.
“I think this is a very important decision and you should vote how you want.”
He turned to the door again. “I wanna support her. I do. But more than that, I don’t want anything to happen to her. So I guess my vote is that the doc’s right. We need all the help we can get.”
“All right. Then rest time is over,” I said. “We need to assume that if they lost contact with these men, they’ll send reinforcements. We need to keep moving. Take whatever you need, but don’t get weighed down.”
“Not to be a dick,” Harriet said to the doctor, “but you’re not really going down there dressed like that, are you?”
He looked down at his bathrobe. It was filthy.
“At least put a vest on,” she said.
“Fair enough.” He took a water bottle from a plastic pack on the ground and slipped it into his wide side pocket. He nudged a wide-eyed guard with his staff. Nothing.
“I’d like to hear about the thing that attacked you,” I said to Harriet.
“I told you, I couldn’t see it. It just hit us. All of us. Boom.”
“At the same time?” the doctor asked. “Everyone?”
Harriet nodded. “Yeah, it didn’t seem to care which side. Everyone went down. Why?” She looked to me. “Is that important?”
“Doesn’t sound like slychs,” the doctor said.
“What’s a slych?”
He smiled. “Something tells me, if you stick with us, you’re gonna find out.” Then he walked to the door. After a moment, Kai followed.
“Detective,” I called.
She waited.
“Why did it leave you alive? Or at least not catatonic like the others?”
“I wondered that myself.” She reached down under her vest and pulled out a small silver amulet. “I thought this mighta slowed it down. But honestly, I dunno. I definitely felt it burying me. Suffocating me. In my head. Next thing I knew, you guys showed up. I was confused.” She waved to the wall where she had nearly shot the doctor. “I’m sorry.”
“You say sorry a lot,” I said.
She looked down. “Yeah.”
“These people are risking their lives. Their families. Everything. If you come, you do as I say. No arguments and no unnecessary risks. I’m not cleaning up one of your messes again. Is that clear?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
We walked out and Kai called to us. Cerise had already climbed the steep slope to the jagged, caged entrance of the mine. The barrier was made of small woven bars. The gaps between were barely big enough for fingers. The Department of Energy had posted another sign warning us of the radioactive materials inside.
She tried the door. “Locked,” she called down to us.
“There should be an emergency release or something,” I said, pushing hard up the slope.
“How do you know that?”
“Because the US government will follow all health and safety regulations. I’m sure that includes steps to ensure no one gets trapped inside.”
“Oh, yeah, I see it.” Cerise had her face pressed to the heavy mesh. “It’s inside the door.” She shook her head. “There’s no way we can reach it, though.”
The doctor rattled the metal. He tried striking the latch with his staff. The metal dented and he swung again and again. Then he stopped. The solid steel staff was heavy, and he was already out of breath.
“It would take hours to hack through that deadbolt,” he panted, “even if we took turns.”
“What do we do?” Kai asked.
Cerise had started climbing.
“What are you doing?” I called.
“You’ll see.”
Her fingers were small and could grip the mesh. She’d taken her shoes off and was using her toes to support herself.
“Doesn’t that hurt?”
“Yes,” she said after a moment. She was concentrating.
Kai pointed to a gap at the top of the barrier, some forty feet high, where the flat top of the gate didn’t evenly match the jagged A-shaped roof of the cave. Cerise grimaced every time she used her toes. But she was making it. We watched her climb higher and higher. Then she swung an arm through the gap.
“There’s no way she’ll fit,” the doctor said softly.
It seemed like he was right.
Cerise swung a leg over. “Owowowowow.” The toes of her left foot were supporting most of her weight. She pushed up as quickly as she could. Her shoulder and the side of her trunk scraped into the gap, but her head didn’t seem to make it.
She pushed. We heard her scraping against the rock. Her body was pivoting on unforgiving steel.
“Babe . . .” Kai said.
She was grunting and struggling. If she lost her footing and fell, her own body weight would snap her neck.
I covered my mouth.
But once her butt got through, she could move her head down to where the gap was just big enough and pull it through. It popped out the other side, where she was barely holding on, and she slipped.
“OH!”
She grabbed the mesh with one hand and swung around to steady herself. She descended. When she was ten feet off the ground, she dropped, preferring bare feet on rock over the continued torture of her toes. She fell to her butt immediately, dusted herself off, and opened the latch.
She could see the skeptical look on my face. “I’m the thief, remember?”
“You made your point,” I said.
She took her shoes and sat to put them on.
“What’s this?” Kai asked.
Toward the back and to one side of the U-shaped space, which narrowed very slowly as it retreated into the bluff, was an enginelike machine with a red frame. Heavy black wires snaked away from it and then into and out of another machine. From there, they were bolted to the wall and disappeared into the mine.
“Looks like a generator,” the doctor said.
Kai turned a key-switch, but nothing happened. “From when?” he asked.
It definitely looked old.
“60s maybe,” Harriet said.
“The nineteen-sixties?” he asked, incredulous.
“Is there another one?” she said sarcastically.
Kai flipped the switch off and then on again. He pressed several heavy square buttons and the machine screamed. We all jumped. We watched as it fluttered with power. There was a pop and the lights glowed.
“There,” he said proudly.
The transformer behind him blew in a shower of sparks and we all ducked. The sound resounded like a lightning strike.
“Turn it off,” I yelled over the piercing noise.
He tried. “It’s stuck!”
There was an electric light in a steel cage fixture high overhead. I don’t think anyone noticed it until it exploded and rained sparks and tiny bits of glass.
“Insulation on those wires is totally worn,” Kai said, defending himself.
Harriet pulled her Glock and looked at the entrance. “Whatever, let’s just get this over with.”
There were additional lights inside, clear bulbs of an old style that fluttered weakly with the alternating current. They didn’t help the mood. It was dark and silent down there, and we had only three lights of our own. Harriet had brought an LED headlamp and Cerise had found two roadside flashlights, one in each of the SUVs. We turned them on.
Harriet led the way, per the agreement. She kept her Glock in her hands and followed the line of weak bulbs that glowed every twenty paces, fed by the thick cluster of wires that ran along the wall. After a short walk, we came to a T-junction, where a shaft to our left plunged straight down. There was a shrine in front of it, if one could call it that. And there was blood on the walls—lines and circles, like constellations, but not any I recognized, and I remembered then that Madame Blavatsky had once told me that the dark ones had their own astrology, completely different from ours, just as they had their own gods. Candles had burnt all the way to the floor and bled wax around the centerpiece—a headless torso stripped of skin. It had no arms and no legs. I could see flies and the hint of ribs poking through the muscle.
“Wicked.” Kai stepped for a closer look, but I stopped him and shook my head. Something was feeding in the cavity, I was sure. I nodded to Harriet, who kicked it over the edge and kept moving.
We reached a Y-intersection in the tunnel, which split off to the right and left. The right tunnel had collapsed some thirty paces in. The left tunnel sloped down. Geared tracks had been laid into it, and there were narrow stairs to one side. We descended single file. At the base was another square vertical shaft. It glowed as our beams flashed over it. It was full of water—perfectly still, like solid glass. Above it was only dark. The only passage was a narrow ledge around the right side barely big enough for toes. There was heavy discarded machinery in the bottomless water, including an up-turned rail cart and what looked like the boom to a small crane or lift. It was completely submerged and rested at an oblique angle against the stone walls. It was coated in a fur of yellow-green algae, which reflected our light brightly, giving the chasm an otherworldly glow.
“I sure hope there’s nothing down there,” Kai whispered.
“Ten bucks says there is,” the doctor whispered back.
“You guys are so paranoid,” Cerise added, also in a hushed voice. “I think it looks like a wishing well.”
“Well, only one way to find out.” Harriet moved toward the ledge, which cut around one side of the square shaft, but I raised a hand and stopped her. “What?”
“Wishing well,” I repeated. I reached into my pocket and took out the coin. I held it in her lamplight.
“Are you sure?” the doctor asked.
I nodded. “The Three Sisters want these out of circulation, right?” I nodded to the seemingly bottomless pit. “Then I offer a trade.” I flipped the coin with my thumb. It flashed in the light and hit the mineral-laden water with barely a splash. Ripples broke the surface, undulating smoothly like snakes. The coin clinked off the crane and sunk into the blackness.
The crane shifted heavily and we all jumped back. The water churned.
We waited. But nothing came. Once the splashing subsided, Harriet began her crossing. Kai followed, making it look easy, even as he kept a hand on his wife, who went next. But there was almost nothing to hold onto. They could only press their hands to the wall. And the splashing water had wet the ledge, making it slippery.
The doctor used his robe’s belt to tie his staff to his back and followed the others.
“Please be careful,” I said as I helped him toe the passage.
We had to navigate two corners to make it to the other side. I took my first step. It was slick. I had to lean into the wall with my chest, head back, to keep from falling. It was awkward. The pool was almost perfectly still again, and it seemed hushed in anticipation, as if it were waiting with bated breath for one of us to fall into its embrace and be pulled down and entombed forever.
Harriet broke our concentration. Her heavy combat boots had good tread but were round-tipped and bulky, and she slipped at the turn and fell into the water with a heavy splash. We all froze, expecting something to undulate up from the depths. There was no point in telling myself not to glance into the pool. It wasn’t possible, even though it significantly increased the chance that I would also lose my balance and fall.
Tense moments passed as Harriet clambered out of the water on the far side. Her headlamp had come loose and was slowly falling. She held out her hands and silently urged us forward. Kai balanced himself deftly. He hopped to the ground and made sure his wife did the same. Harriet grabbed the doctor’s arm and pulled him and then me. We all turned back to the swaying water, now lit faintly by Harriet’s unseen lamp somewhere in the depths. The water finally broke through to the battery and the light flickered and died. We watched it fade.
There were bolt holes in the floor near the ledge. I ran my shoe over them. There had once been a bridge or other structure over the flooded shaft, but it had been removed recently. The bundle of wires continued their trek along the wall deeper into the mine, stopping only at the periodic breaker boxes on the wall. They were our guide, and we followed. Silence enveloped us, the kind of deep silence you can only get underground. It was so quiet, I could hear the rattling of the filament in a nearby bulb, tinkling weakly inside the glass as the current wavered. There was a cluster of lamps at the next gap, perched on a pole above a board with numbered pegs, but it was dark. I opened the electrical box that fed them and flipped a heavy plastic switch. The filaments in the bulbs began to glow, but only weakly, and we flashed our lights across the space. The beams hit a staggered recession that descended, like an upside-down concert hall, three stories below us. Between it and us, the gap was crossed by a kind of scaffolding, like a children’s jungle gym, whose sea foam-green paint was heavily chipped and scuffed. It was affixed to the floor on our side but to the ceiling on the other. The bundle of heavy wires we’d been following crossed underneath and disappeared into an open double-doorway on the far side.
“How are we going to get down there?” Cerise asked in the quiet, peering over the edge to the bottom of the staggered recession, which narrowed to a point. “And once we do, how are we going to get up to the doors? There’s no stairs or anything.”
“Like this.” I picked up a small rock from corner and tossed it. As it passed through the bars, it stopped its arc down and arced up instead. It hit the ceiling on the far side and bounced across it to the open doors, where it stopped, as if clinging to the ceiling like a magnet.
“We’re here,” I said.
We had reached the Handred Keep—buried by the Bureau, as I suspected, under tons of rock. They had dropped it into the gap of the mine and then exploded the bluff on top so their arcane scientists could study it in secret.
“Last chance,” I said to the others.
Harriet started forward through the bars. When across, her feet fell up instead of down. From our point of view, she stood upside down on the ceiling.
“Freaky . . .” Kai breathed.
The center of the concavity was shaped like a giant mouth, and it had been propped open with two tall iron girders, which I had mistaken for columns at first. The mouth was flanked by two empty holes which had once held toothed tentacles of some size. The open doors looked like brownish stone. But they were not stone.
“It’s similar to bone,” I said to Kai, who was marveling at them after we crossed.
“Look at this.” He pointed at a door and Cerise shone a light. There was a reddish-brown hand print.
“That’s Rasputin’s hand.”
“The Rasputin?” Cerise whispered.
“To consecrate the temple, which he had bred, Rasputin dipped his hand in the freshly spilled blood of an innocent and pressed it like a stamp on the stone door. It was symbolic. The human hand is the source of our agency, our power. It’s how we manipulate the world, whether by machine or magic. All tools come from it. The consecration was an announcement that the seekers of the dark would take, by blood, what they wished from the world. It was as close as anything to a declaration of war.”
I looked up. “We called it the Handred Keep,” I said softly, “because we never knew its real name.”
The mark unnerved me, presumably for what I had once associated with it, but whatever had happened there, I could no longer remember.
“The seekers of the dark wouldn’t so much as utter its real name, the same way Jews won’t speak the name of God. Names have a certain controlling power. You can control a demon if you know its true name—and if you have the will. We intercepted some of their minor correspondences and knew only how they described it colloquially in their native tongue, where, like in the Romance languages, modifiers come after nouns. In an official report, some clever scribe changed ‘the temple of the hand-red’ to the Handred Keep, and it stuck.”
I turned to them. “This is it,” I said. “Once we go through those doors, there’s no turning back. Our enemies are masters of deception. Expect that whatever we find inside will be unlike anything you have seen before. Some of it may not be real. Don’t get distracted. If we’re lucky, they won’t expect us to have made it this far. But that doesn’t mean this isn’t a trap. Stay focused. Stay alert. We all carry a separate pain, and that has brought us here for different reasons. Some of us chose it. Others were propelled along. But none of that matters anymore. The stakes are too high. If we can’t find a way to work together, then none of us will survive.”
Harriet nodded to me. Kai and Cerise squeezed each other’s hands. The doctor walked to the door, hefted his staff, and gouged a diagonal cut across the red hand. Bits of the hard, bonelike material fell to the floor.
“For Bug,” he said, and walked inside.
The steps up to the entrance hall stuck out from grooves in the floor like teeth in a skull, and in fact they were very similar to teeth, just as the phalanges of the door were similar to bone. The entrance chamber was dark and vast and the shuffles of our feet echoed. The floor was dark and smooth, like a black oyster shell. I had wiped most of my memories of that place, but I knew that when it was alive, it excreted a plasterlike covering that was naturally pigmented and looked like a cross between Victorian wallpaper and the diamond banding on a viper. But all of that had long since rotted away—or was carted off the Bureau. Only the smooth shell remained.
I noticed Cerise looking up, and I stepped to her. “What do you see?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. I mean, I see what you guys see. Everything else is gone. It’s like we’re inside a black hole or something.”
“We are,” I said.
The fortress narrowed as it descended—or ascended from our new point of view—like a tall ziggurat of progressively smaller vertebrae, each of which turned slightly from the one below. We were then on the largest floor. They would get smaller as we climbed. A wide central staircase curved up the entire expanse, winding around an undulating, grooved tube, now empty, which had held the fortress’s central nerves. It was open all the way to the top, but we could see only dark. Harriet cautioned us silently with her hands not to shine our lights about, certainly not up, lest we give away our presence to anyone waiting on those higher floors.
From the wide stairwell, several doors opened. The heavy black electrical wires we had followed from the surface, long ago installed by the Bureau, now began to peel off one by one to feed chambers distant.
“Which way do we go?” the doctor asked in a whisper.
Kai was looking up. “Not to be negative, but it would take a really long time to search this whole place if we all have to stick together.”
“We stick together,” I reiterated.
“I say we go right to the top,” Harriet suggested.
The others agreed, and we started up the toothlike stairs that curled like a conch cell around the central nerve cavity. We only made it one and a half times around before we heard and felt a crunch under our feet. We shone our lights on animal bones. They littered the stairs, having spilled like a mound of grain out of a giant oblong gap in the staircase wall. It wasn’t a door. It was rounded and smooth and a good fifteen feet over the steps with no way to reach it. I suspect it had been covered in soft tissues when the fortress was alive and that the incredibly tall chamber beyond had been its gullet. With the flesh now rotten away, the massive pile of bones at the bottom of the four-story stomach fell out the oblong hole and spilled into a pile and across the steps and onto the floor of a hall that curled off to our right. Some of the bones were quite small—not just short, like finger bones, but narrow like needles. I knelt and picked up what appeared to be a clean, dry wing bone from a songbird. It weighed almost nothing. There were larger bones as well: horned goat skulls, beaked bird heads, fanged mandibles, all manner of ribs and vertebrae, scapulas like blunt tomahawks, and more. With a face drained of blood, the doctor stepped into the pile and removed a jawless skull that had been cracked in half. By its shape and size, it had clearly belonged to a toddler or small child. There was no telling how many people were lost in that gargantuan meal.
“What do we do?” Cerise asked.
The way was blocked. Kai, being the most agile among us, attempted the climb, but he didn’t get very far before the pile shifted under him and he slid back to the stairs, taking thousands of bones with him. The movement released more bones from the gullet and they cascaded out in a clatter like the downpour of rain. It echoed up the central cavity.
“So much for keeping a low profile,” Harriet muttered.
“They know we’re here,” the doctor said, looking up.
We heard a distant voice then resounding faintly down from the top of the silo-shaped gullet.
“Hello?”
We all froze. By the looks on their faces, I could tell the others had the same shock I’d had: it was a child’s voice. A little boy.
“Hello?” Cerise called.
“Shhh!” Harriet chided.
“It’s the boy!” Cerise shot back in a stout whisper.
We all listened. But there was nothing.
“It could be a deception,” Harriet suggested.
“No,” Cerise said. “It isn’t.”
“She sees things,” I explained.
Cerise, Harriet, and I traded looks in the dark and quiet. Cerise wanted to call again and silently argued her case with gestures and facial expressions. The men were more direct. They stepped back, urging us to stop arguing and to look for a way up. It was a good point. We could do nothing from down there. I motioned down the hall, and Harriet nodded.
The rooms of the Keep were grown, same as the rest of it. They were not symmetrical, but they grew in runs of three to five, each with the same basic shape. The smaller were near the center, and each next room curved slightly away from the one before, indicating outward, radial growth. We passed evidence of the Bureau’s habitation: stacked desks and fallen chairs, some covered in sheets. I stepped on a dirty piece of paper and caught the date: January 4, 1982.
The passage opened into a rotunda where there seemed to be half a dozen people standing around dressed as ghosts. If so, there were frozen. Harriet walked to one, gun in hand. She turned back and I nodded. She pulled the sheet. There was a small globe atop an uneven stack of boxes with a broom leaning against it. She pulled another sheet and it was much the same—a glass lamp on a narrow shelf. Cerise walked past us and pulled another.
“Freaky,” she whispered.
Three passages split from the rotunda.
“Which way?” Harriet asked.
“Up,” I said.
There was a ramp to our left, and it took us around a gentle curve that straightened into a kind of undulating tube lined in successively shrinking concavities. At its terminus was a large chamber.
A burst of static.
To my left, inside one of the larger concavities, was an antique broadcast array, with a tangle of wires running back and forth between dialed consoles. At the center was an operator’s station: three 1950s wooden chairs sat before a narrow ledge under a block grid of headphone jacks. Overhead, one of the heavy electrical wires descended from a higher floor and ran along the cavity to feed the largest of the rectangular machines, which was connected to all the others. It seems our meddling with the generator out front had resupplied it with power. On the desk-ledge was a black plastic headset with microphone arm and foam ear covers. It looked brand new. But the Bureau had installed the radio, I was sure. It clearly dated from the post-war era. Our enemies had been using it. There was a heavy, leatherbound tome on the operator’s ledge, and I walked over and ran my finger along the open page. It looked like a Victorian ledger, with printed dark green blocks encasing a neat fountain-pen script. There were symbols as well, magical runes whose origin was a complete mystery to me. Across from each on the left were clusters of words. Council. Ringer. Yellow. Soldier. Cyst. Edmonton. Beggarly.
Harriet came up behind me. She flipped through the browned pages, reading a few of the words. “Tyrant. Red. Perspicacity.”
“Does it mean something to you?” I asked.
“This is how they were communicating with each other.”
“Come on,” Kai urged. “If there’s a boy here, we should find him.”
Harriet nodded and we followed the passage down the opposite bend, where it narrowed and shrunk and we had to duck. It was not meant as a passage. It held flesh when the Keep was alive.
We emerged into another tall chamber, but it was also very narrow, with barely any room between the walls, which were no longer smooth. There was a pattern, a cross between coral and snake skin. Spiraling around the opposite wall, as if carved from it, were a series of progressively larger and more complicated but otherwise identical conical shapes. Those near the center of the spiral were tiny and imperfectly formed. They matured and grew as they spiraled around. Each was a kind of extended vertebral ziggurat: fetal Keeps.
“We’re in its womb,” I breathed.
We all craned our necks and marveled at the three-story structure, our beams dancing over it like submarine lights at depth.
“We can climb this,” Harriet said.
She was right. As they turned around the spiral, the vertebral shapes sat at an angle to the floor and offered plenty of hand- and footholds. She started immediately. The rest of us had to make a few adjustments. Cerise and I clipped our lights to our pant loops, which did little to help, and we took them off and stuck them inside tied shirttails instead. It was less secure, but at least the beams pointed up. The doctor tied his staff to his back again, and we started up, following the trail that Harriet blazed. It wasn’t until we were halfway that we realized the tiny Keeps at the center were too small to fit our fingers between, and we had to move around. Kai made it first, testing for the best path and calling out to the rest of us from the top, which he reached in almost no time.
“Don’t look down,” he advised his wife, who of course immediately did.
“Whoa . . .”
I admit to not being a fan of heights, and I was all too happy to feel the doctor grab my hand and pull me up into the four-foot-tall recession at the top. We had to stoop to make it out the far hole. His staff got caught. The diamond tip wedged itself securely, and it took us a few minutes to free it, by which time Harriet and Kai had found our destination.
“I thought we were going to stick together,” I chided as they returned from around a bend.
“It’s just here,” Kai defended himself. “I can see him.”
Harriet wasn’t happy. “I don’t like this. Where is everybody?”
“You think it’s a trap?”
“Don’t you?” the doctor said, behind me.
“We’re not leaving a child down there,” Cerise interjected.
The undulating passage curved to an egg-shaped chamber that erupted like a cyst from the wall. Its floor was smooth and sloped down at an increasingly steep angle to the large circular gap that filled the center. The ceiling was naturally ridged. Along the ridges were regularly-spaced bolts which held hanging chains. Most fell through the hole and disappeared. The others dangled the corpses of small animals. The fresh remains of a white-coated pit bull turned slowly near my head. The barbed tip of a giant fishhook had been forced through the roof of the animal’s mouth and into its brain. It had been hung on it, and the weight of its own body had caused the hook to disfigure its face into a deranged sneer. I caught the glint of a name tag hanging from its collar. Barney. It had been someone’s pet. It’s sorrowful eyes were still open. It died not understanding what was happening.
I turned away.
“Awful . . .”
The others did the same.
“I hope there’s a special place in hell for these assholes,” Harriet said, staring at the room.
“Why would anyone do this?” Cerise asked. She couldn’t look at the animals either. Instead, she fixed her eyes to the grooves carved into the walls, onto which hard, sharp, penetrating sigils had been carved.
“It’s a spell,” the doctor told her. “A spell of corruption.”
“Corruption? Corruption of what?”
“Him.” Harriet had stepped onto the sloped floor. She pointed to the hole.
Cerise took a step. Her flat-soled Keds slipped and she started sliding swiftly toward the opening. Kai dove and grabbed her, but he slipped as well. They passed Harriet, who dropped to her butt with the soles of her combat boots planted perpendicular to the slope. She grabbed Kai. Her soles squeaked against the floor, but I had already moved to grab her. I reached for the doctor, who had driven his staff into the floor as an anchor.
“It’s the boy,” Cerise said from her perch near the edge of the hole.
“Hello.” His small voice echoed across the gap.
“Are you okay?” She called. He must have nodded his response, because she nodded back.
“But I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Hold on,” she said. “We’re gonna get you out out of there.”
“Okay.”
It took us several minutes to get everyone back to sure footing.
“He’s on a sort of platform,” Cerise said. “I don’t think it’s part of the fortress. It has a railing and metal grate floor. It’s attached to four big chains. It’s just hanging in space.”
“We’re gonna have to use the chains,” Kai said, looking up at them.
“Do they go all the way down?” Harriet asked Cerise.
“There are more pets at the end,” she said. “But yeah. The chains near the middle are a short drop above the platform. They’re too high for the boy to reach, but one of us could, if we jumped.”
“Do you think they can support our weight?” I asked.
“Plus his,” Harriet added. “It’s a looong way down.”
“I’m the lightest,” Cerise said. “I’ll go.”
I stopped her. “We need you on lookout.”
“I’ll go,” Kai said. “I’m probably next-lightest.”
In truth, that was probably me, but if so, it wasn’t by much, and Kai was certainly the more agile.
“We do the reverse of what we just practiced,” the doctor said, driving his staff just behind a ridge in the floor. “We make a human chain, get Kai to the center. He shimmies down, gets the boy, and we bring them both back up. Make sense?”
The others nodded, and we set to work. We set our flashlights down such that they shone from different angles at the center of the room. Then we grasped each other’s hands tightly and stepped out carefully in order of body mass. The doctor was at the back. Then Harriet. Then me. Then Cerise and finally Kai, who didn’t seem to need our help at all as he tiptoed down the slope to the edge, holding his wife’s hand.
“Careful,” she chided.
“You need to keep an eye out,” I told her, eyes on my own feet. My only job was to be an anchor and I was going to do it.
“We’re fine,” she said, looking around. “They probably didn’t—”
She stopped, and all eyes shot to her. Hers were glued to a dark nook in the wall, near the ceiling on the far side.
“They’re here,” she whispered.
“What is?” Harriet demanded.
None of us could see anything.
“They’re here!” Cerise shouted, trying desperately to pull her husband back.
“Go back!” Cerise yelled. “Go back!”
“Where are they?”
“They’re right there! Slychs. Three of them. They’re coming! Shit! They’re coming!”
“Hold onto her!” I shouted to Harriet. I put her hand in Cerise’s.
“What are you doing?”
“He brought the little boy here for a reason,” I whispered as I slid on my butt down to the hole and then through.
I fell.